Flying Kites &

Other Life-Death Matters

Lesley D. Clement

Lakehead University-Orillia (Ontario, Canada)

TRT 5th International Children’s Media Conference December 2016

Images from Drachen Foundation

Drachen.org

Images from www.rutahsa.com

Christopher Ornelas, Wings of Resistance: The Giant Kites of Guatemala (DrachenFoundation, 2013)

Guatemalan barriletes gigantes (giant kites) with telegramas (messages) for the dead

Santiago and Sumpango

Polynesian Kite

Kite Flying by Suzuki Harunobu, 1766 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City)

Teizo Hashimoto kite representing Kintaro and carp

Guatemalan Kite Makers

Their kites ‘frame the way that history’ – their history – is

being written. Drawing upon Susan Sontag’s discussion of

Holocaust photographs in Regarding the Pain of Others

(Picador, 2003), we could conclude that, ‘rather than

reinforcing the narrative “of death, of failure, of

victimization,” these kites “invoke the miracle of

survival”’ (Ornelas).

Part One: Adapting Death for Changing Contexts

Part Two: Ritualizing Death and Life After Death

Part Three: Politicizing Death

Part Four: Picturing Death

Part Five: Metaphorizing Death

Part Six: Playing with Death

THEME #1

ROLE OF

MENTORS OR

ELDERS

Guatemalan barrileteros (master kite makers)

Grandparents

2001

Boy, no one could do anything to me …

Chapter 1

Daniel Pinti,

‘Thus did hearth-companions grieve

their lord’s fall’: Death, Mourning,

and the Children’s Beowulf

1999

Beowulf:

‘Death is no terrible thing for

one who has lived well.’

‘What one sees in various but striking ways in contemporary versions of Beowulf for young readers are opportunities to imagine personal and cultural mourning, whether it be in terms of denial, celebration, or critique’ (Pinti).

Chapter 2

Ginger Stelle,

Loyalty, Honor, and Death in Rick

Riordan’s OlympusSeries

THEME #2

PLASTICITY OF BELIEFS,

TRADITIONS, AND RITUALS

Modern fairy tales …

Chapter 15: Frans Weiser, ‘From the Ecological to the Digital: Salman Rushdie’s Many Lives of Storytelling’

Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea ofStories (1990) and Luka and the Fire of Life (2010)

Chapter 14: Maria Luisa Alonso, ‘Michael Ende’s Philosophy of Death, Life, and Time’

Michael Ende’s Momo (1973) and Die unendliche Geschichte [The Neverending Story] (1979)

FAIRY TALES

‘The historical evolution of storytelling reflects struggles of human beings worldwide to adapt to their changing natural and social environments’ (Zipes).

Being ‘derived largely from collective efforts, … these stories circulate in multiple versions, reconfigured by each telling to form kaleidoscopic variations with distinctly different effects’ (Tatar).

Princeton UP, 2012

1999

Chapter 3

Margarita Georgieva,

A Deathly Underworld:

Bulgarian Literature for

Children of the Early Twentieth

Century

Elin Pelin, Yan Bibiyan: The

Incredible Adventures of a Kid (1933)

&

Nikolai Rainov, ‘Kingdom of the

Samodivas ,’ Bulgarian Tales

(1933) Illustrations for Rainov’sSamodivsko tsarstvo by Mira Yovcheva bochoart.com

Politicizing Death

Chapter 7: Urvi Mukhopadhyay, From Ultimate Punishment to Heroic Sacrifice, and After: Representations of Death in Bengali Children’s Literature from the Colonial Era

Chapter 8: Julie K. deGraffenried, A New Normal: Death and Dying in a Soviet Children’s Magazine, 1941-1945

Chapter 9: Susana S. Martínez, Contemporary Coming of Age(ncy): Narratives of Political Violence and Death in El Salvador and Guatemala: ‘So that future generations may be aware’

Chapter 7

Urvi Mukhopadhyay,

From Ultimate Punishment to Heroic

Sacrifice, and After: Representations of

Death in Bengali Children’s Literature from the Colonial Era

IswarchandraVidyasagar’s

Varnaparichay[Introduction to

the Alphabet] (1855)

Stories by

Ray Choudhury

&Sukumar Ray

Ray Choudhury, ‘Sheyal Pandit’

[‘The Scholarly Fox’] (1910)

Satiric images by Sukumar Ray from

the 1920s

The sacred ‘must always be subject to questioning, deconstruction, even to declarations of their obsolescence. To respect the sacred is to be paralysed by it’ (Rushdie).

‘Ironically, however, seventy years later, with female foeticide and child abuse still rampant, the connection between death and children in Bengali culture is as relevant now as it was one hundred and two hundred years ago. It is time for Bengali children’s literature to enter the fray in ways that reflect social realities – or, in the spirt of SukumarRay, to debunk them’ (Mukhopadhyay).

THEME #3

NEGOTIATION OF THE

CONUNDRUM THAT DEATH

CAN NEVER BE SEEN AND

HENCE NEVER REPRESENTED

Woodcut illustration, MitraMajumdar’s Thakurmar Jhuli

[Grandma’s Bag of Tales](1907)

Maya Glyphs

Chapter 10

Lesley D. Clement,

The Last Resort: Death and

Liminality in Children’s Picture Books on Emily

Dickinson

Emily Dickinson, ‘Because I could not stop for Death – / He kindly stopped for me’ (illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault, My Letter to the World and Other Poems, KCP Poetry, 2008 )

Illustrations by

Gary Kelley in

Jane Yolen’sThe Emily Sonnets:

The Life of Emily Dickinson (Creative

Editions, 2012)

Chapter 11

Penni Cotton,

Old Age and Death in Northern European

Picture Books: Achieving Empathy through Textual and

Filmic Images of Sweden’s Kan du

Vissla Johanna

Illustrations by Anna Höglundin Ulf Stark’s

Can You Whistle,

Johanna? (1992; Gecko Press, 2005)

Physical Artifact

Concrete Memory

(Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Grief and Grieving,

Simon & Schuster, 2005)

Chapter 12

Magdalena Sikorska& KatarzynaSmyczyńska

Visual Narratives of Death and Memory:

The Holocaust in Two Contemporary

European Picture Books

2011 2008

THEME #4

WHAT DEATH REPRESENTS

METAPHORICALLY

Kite Boy, from the studio of Stasia Burrington

stasiaburrington.com

Because ‘death cannot be represented … the analysis of it must show not only how it claims to represent death, but also what else it in fact represents, however suppressed: assertion of alternative power, self-referential metaphor, aggression against individuals or groups, formation of group identities and ideologies, and so forth’ (Elisabeth Bronfen and Sarah Goodwin, introduction to Death and Representation, Johns Hopkins UP, 1993).

Chapter 4

Hossein SheykhRezaee, with other

members of the research group of the

Children’s Book Council of Iran,

Holy Death: Constructions of

Martyrdom in Persian Children’s Literature

on the Eight-Year War between Iraq and Iran

Samad Behrangi, Maahi siyaah-e kuchulu [The Little Black Fish] (1968)

‘The symbolic universes used to legitimate martyrdom have become increasingly sophisticated’; ‘some writers have tried to confront their readers with death as an unpleasant phenomenon’ (Rezaee et al.).

THEME #5

ACTIVE ROLE THAT CHILDREN CAN PLAY & ARE

ENCOURAGED TO PLAY IN

FRAMING THEIR OWN

PERCEPTIONS OF & RESPONSES TO

DEATH

Chapter 8

Julie deGraffenried,

A New Normal: Death and Dying

in a Soviet Children’s Magazine, 1941-1945

Double-spread illustration by A. Shishov, ‘V razvedke’ [‘On Reconnaissance’], Murzilka (July 1942)

‘In the latter years of the war, gaps in the messages about war, death, and dying appeared, allowing the child reader ample opportunity to manipulate messages conveyed by conflicting images and texts for personal purposes’ (deGraffenried).

Chapter 9

Susana Martínez,

Contemporary Coming of Age(ncy):

Narratives of Political Violence and Death in El Salvador

and Guatemala, ‘So that future

generations may be aware’

Chapter 15

Frans Weiser,

From the Ecological to the

Digital: Salman Rushdie’s

Many Lives of Storytelling

1990

2010

‘Thus this new form of interaction provides a platform for storytelling to augment continually its multiple lives’

(Weiser).

Chapter 17

Susan ShauMing Tan,

Battling School: Death as

Education in Ender’s Game

‘This death is made possible – and, in fact, is delivered – through child’s play’ (Tan).

Chapter 18

Markus P.J. Bohlmann,

MachinicLiaisons:

Death’s Dance with Children in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief

THEME #6

LITERATURE INCORPORATING

DEATH ENHANCES CHILDREN’S

SENSE OF COMMUNITY –

PAST, PRESENT, & FUTURE

6000 Palestinian children in northern Gaza attempting tobreak world record in UN-sponsored event (The Telegraph)

Chapter 16

Rosana Kohl Bines,

Mocking Death in Brazilian

Children’s Folk Literature

‘The experience of consensual death becomes, paradoxically, a testimony to childhood’s vital, resilient force that remains unaltered in the

presence of destruction. In their playful unconcern regarding the worst

and in their blunt mockery of death, children do not avoid or reject

death but, conversely, incorporate it in the course of life itself, as

something that simply occurs at the end of each stanza. Life and

death are not antagonists after all, but neighboring dimensions that can

suddenly come into contact through a coincidence of sounds. That

nothing more than a rhyme might be enough to bring life and death

together is the powerful truth that children whisper to us through the

Tangolomango’ (Bines).

CONCLUSION

Children fly kites at a cemetery, against backdrop of the Volcan del Agua [Water Volcano], during the Day of the Dead celebrations in Santa Maria de

Jesus, Guatemala www.dailymail.co.uk

THE 3R’S

RESOURCEFULNESS

RESILIENCE

RESISTANCE

Tangled, from the studio of Stasia Burrington

stasiaburrington.com